‘Spy’ who loved a Lib Dem: ex-aide fights deportation

THE FORMER Commons researcher accused of passing on information to the Russian Intelligence Service has admitted that she had a four-year affair with her boss, the Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock, but said that claims she was a spy were "laughable".
 
Katia Zatuliveter, 26, began her appeal against deportation yesterday, telling an immigration tribunal that allegations that she targeted the married 65-year-old backbencher as part of a 'honeytrap' operation were "absurd". 

Zatuliveter, who was arrested in December for trying to access secret defence information from Hancock, a member of the diplomatic select committee, also accused MI5 of failing to come up with any evidence against her.
 
During a tense five-hour session, prosecution lawyers acting for the Home Secretary accused Zatuliveter of acting as Moscow's "eyes and ears in the heart of the House of Commons". Jonathan Glasson told the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) that the Lib Dem aide had spied for Russia "from the heart of British democracy in parliament".
 
"I have never done that," Zatuliveter insisted, adding: "I don't believe MI5 is so unprofessional. It has not come up with any evidence."
 
The Siac panel chaired by Mr Justice Mitting, and including Sir Stephen Lander, a former head of MI5, also heard how Zatuliveter had had a string of affairs while she worked as a chaperone at international conferences in St Petersburg.
 
It was there that Zatuliveter met Hancock,  though it was the Lib Dem MP, some 40 years her senior, who seduced her, she told the panel. The pair had gone for a drink in the lobby of his hotel where Hancock told the then 21-year-old that he wanted to sleep with her, she claimed.

"He went up to his room and he brought [back] a CD and some money," she said, adding that she refused to sleep with him or take the money. "He made it very clear from the beginning he was interested in me. He tried to kiss me. He was very charming during this time."
 
That same year Zatuliveter moved to Britain and began working for Hancock for three or four days a month, for which she was granted a Parliamentary pass. In 2008 she began to work for him full-time as a researcher, with access to his Parliamentary email account. She also moved in with Hancock at his central London flat where she opened weekly correspondence from the select committee including letters marked 'private and confidential'. She told the hearing: "I was able to read them, but I was not interested."
 
The panel also heard how, after Zatuliveter's affair with Hancock ended in March 2010, she started a relationship with a man only named as Y, a European official who worked for Nato.
 
Zatuliveter's counsel, Tim Owen QC, described MI5's case as based on a "series of crude stereotypes". He told the panel that MI5 was relying on "only one alleged specific fact", that Zatuliveter "may have" met a Russian intelligence officer at parliamentary offices in Westminster in December 2008.
 
The hearing continues. ·